Inspired by a oneliner on Orange Juice the other day, which went something like this "Most of scene-graphicians are rippers", I decided to finally bring out my personal opinion on ripping to you all. Right here in the beginning I'd like to say that I do not understand people who rip stuff from paintings, or other art done by other artists (incl. art photographers), instead I understand that people rip from photographs they've taken themselves or taken from a magazine.

First of all I don't really understand the real fuss about ripping, since this is demoscene (Notice that I did not say this is just demoscene). We are supposed to do this for fun, and if someone considers ripping fun, well, I think he's allowed to do that, altho' that way he might not get too much respect from other people. Also demoscene is derived from the cracking scene, where copyrights sure as hell didn't mean a damn thing. So ripping is in some obscure way a fine memorial to the old scene, where we came from.

Then the historical point of view. There's always been ripping, no matter if the object of rippin' is a photograph or a model. No one seriously thinks that the old man Da Vinci made Mona Lisa up in his own head? Surely he had a model sitting right there in his cozy little studio. So is that ripping? Modeling another person's face like that? Ok, ok. I see the argument here, Leonardo's model did know that her face was about to be painted onto a tiny piece of fabric. But surely Anna Kournikova doesn't know her face has been ripped by some Gnuudude/Bluugroup somewhere. This is a valid point which stands against ripping. Does each of us have a copyright on our faces? No, but the photograph where you ripped from does. But is it really worth the copyright, some tennisplayer sweating around hitting a ball. Anyone who was there watching the game saw the same a hundred times. But if the photograph would've been made in a studio with a nice set design and Anna being just showered and with full make up in front of the camera, now there we would a picture where the photographer has really done something out of the ordinary.

Coming up is the financial and social section. Ok, hiring models ain't free, and not even cheap most of the times, so we can forget about making pics of live models. And then to the social part. Most of us are geeks. Surprise? So what's the actual possibilities to go to the elite parties of your city and get some perfect chick to model for you for free? And hey, we ain't counting those sloppy teens, who'd do a blowjob for a cigarette! But face it, the real fine ladies are out of the reach (or have their schedules full, damn). Ok, one more chance, who wants to be the first one to draw and ugly bitch onto the screen and go for a compo? No-one? Ok. So now we're sitting in front of our computer, with no models around. What can we do, hidden camera is a bad idea (ask the police if you don't believe me), also importing Koalas or other foreign animals is usually forbidden, so we're out of animal models too. There is merely two chances, you can either find some magazine and find a nice picture of a good looking girl and/or animal in there and RIP it, or you can spend useless hours trying to figure out how an Elephant looks, how does it's wrinkles go and so on, and be intuitive and not rip a pic. So which one sounds more like fun to you?

Summs summarum. What did we all learn here today? The more you rip, the more fun you are having, and the less respect you get. But it makes you a better artist by time. The less you rip, the fewer pics you are most likely to release and you have to actually do stuff, research and anatomy lessons for your pics, it's more rewarding in the long shot plus you get more respect. So I would like to say that we have two kinds of artists around, those who do it for fun, and those who do it to become famous and good. As usual, I wouldn't like to blame either one, but to encourage the rippers to try doing something the hard way, and asking for the non-rippers to understand that people like to draw, but not everyone has a good analogy knowledgement and or precise imagination. As we all know, these are needed in demoscene, since cubism, surrealism or anything hasn't really made it through to the prizes ever. Just draw the way you find it suitable for yourself, improve yourselves as graphicians and be more tolerant.

Zeroic/Details (a ripper and a learner under one skin)

PS. Please don't RE if you ain't got something constructive to say, we've been through this conversation n^x times already.